One of my earliest memories is my grandmother having her leg amputated when I was 7 years old; she later died of complications due to Type 2 diabetes. My uncle was pre-diabetic and had developed dementia.

My name is Jared. About 7 months ago I was 302 lbs. I was 24 years old and told myself I couldn’t be 25 and be over 300 lbs, so I figured it was time for drastic changes. I wanted to lose 100 lbs by my birthday on October 6th. Today is the 26th of October and I’m 190 lbs.

I completely cut out all soda and sugar based drinks, started drinking a gallon of water a day and cut out bread and all fast food. I lost almost 60 lbs in the first two months and got addicted to the results I was seeing. So I just kept going. Losing 110 lbs in 7 months isn’t easy, but is definitely obtainable if you stick to your diet and do a lot of cardio. I love basketball so I played a lot of that and also started jogging with some sprints involved to get the heart rate up. I also incorporated box jumps.

The one thing I’ve prided myself in is that I have no set foot in a gym once. You don’t need a gym to meet your fitness goals. You can jog, do push-ups, and do sit-ups anywhere. Now that I’m at a weight where I feel comfortable, I started weightlifting to tone up and build some lean muscle.

Lustig, a Professor of Paediatrics who also works at the University of California’s Centre for Obesity Assessment, said that the dangers to human health caused by added sugar were such that products packed with it should carry the same warnings as alcohol. It was an eye-opener: as a doctor I already knew too much of anything is bad for you, but here was someone telling us that something most of ate unthinkingly every day was, slowly, killing us.

The more I looked into it, the more it became abundantly clear to me that it was sugar, not fat, which was causing so many of our problems – which is why, along with a group of fellow medical specialists I launched the lobbying group Action on Sugar last year with the aim of persuading the food industry to reduce added sugar in processed foods.